WRITING TIME AND INTERACTION

International Symposium Writing Time and Interaction

As a part of the Resonances 2006 Convention dedicated to the topics of gesture and interaction, this symposium aims at questioning the renewal of the technical concepts of time and interaction in different artistic and audiovisual production areas.

In music, temporal structures can be conceived of with almost no limit to their complexity. However, they generally rely on a few basic representations combining metrics (multiples and subdivisions of a pulse cycle), linear time (sequencers) and immediate interaction in the spirit of the instrument metaphor (real-time software environments such as Max).

Various convergent approaches currently tend to overcome these limits through performer/computer interfaces based on longer term musical processes, or through the definition of temporal relationship networks between events that are not necessarily referenced to an absolute or pulsed time basis. This concern is also present when conceiving live performances, which bring together several artistic forms of expression (e.g. music composition and choreography): it is then necessary to define processes which respect the temporality of each artistic form in a meaningful and technically viable way. In the area of interactive systems for virtual reality, games or installations, interaction concepts rely on various sensory modalities (image, sound, gesture) that can be managed separately or together (multimodal fusion) and on the notion of languages that enable the user to interpret and to perform these interactions.

Multi-discipline artistic projects bringing together the live performance and digital universes combine the characteristics of the two former situations and introduce, with respect to virtual reality, an additional dimension concerning the interactions between the real performance space and virtual worlds. Their formalization remains limited due to the lack of support languages that are rich enough, open and adapted to artistic forms.

From the viewpoint of the formalization of time and interaction processes, these various artistic situations share common issues: coordination of different sensory modalities, combination of an interaction permitting a space for instantaneous variation along with longer term time processes (narrative structure, large temporal form). The organization of the symposium aims at producing a cross-disciplinary confrontation between these various approaches in order to enable the emergence of common directions of formalization.